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When a neighbor asked Irma Schneider if she would become a calendar girl — pull on a leather jacket, jump on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and transform into "Easy Lady Rider" — she said sure.

"I had a little trouble getting on the motorcycle," said the woman born seven months after the end of World War I. With help, Schneider hoisted herself onto the catbird seat and gave the throttle a turn.

"It was great," she said, reaching out in her living room to grasp imaginary handlebars. "Vroom, vroom."

The idea that ended with the pictures plastered in homes across The Patrician mobile home retirement community started with an email. A friend shot John Sepulveda a note about a German calendar featuring seniors dressed up as Mary Poppins, Sly Stallone's Rocky and Marilyn Monroe posed over a subway grate.

It made the 77-year-old retired high school tennis coach and one-time urban planner think about his neighbors at The Patrician, in midtown Ventura. They line dance, play poker on Tuesday and bingo on Thursday and gather occasionally for dinner and wine on Friday. One of them gets up early each morning to make sure that day's newspapers are placed next to their neighbors' doors.

They chatter about everything from D-Day to the challenge of staying up until 11 p.m. to watch that night's finale of "Dancing With The Stars." Mostly, they tease each other and laugh. A lot.

Sepulveda decided he and his neighbors would make their own 2018 calendar.

"It looked like it would be fun and these people are fun," Sepulveda said, adding that he put together a list of possible models. "I thought it would be better to start with the older people. Better for reasons you can probably figure out."

"While we're still here," offered a laughing Evelyn Knapp, carrying a cane and perched on a sofa with other models in the elegant home Schneider shares with her daughter.

Evelyn Knapp is a spry 94, four years younger than her husband, Don.

"We were married a week before Pearl Harbor," she said.

When the attack happened, they had to look at a map to find the Navy base. A year later, he was in the Army, landing on Normandy about 15 days after D-Day. He was a tank commander.

Sepulveda decided the Knapps should race in his calendar in wheelchairs, both wearing safety helmets. He placed orange cones at the starting line and marked the finish line with a tape made of toilet paper. The race spanned three feet.

Evelyn won. By three feet. At the finish, she flung her arms in the air like Usain Bolt.

"I wouldn't like coming in last place, except for the love of a beautiful woman that I would willingly lose to all the time. I swear, man," Don Knapp said. His wife rolled her eyes, a maneuver she's perfected over 75 years of marriage.

The youngest models in the calendar are Bertha and Lee Robinson, who are 68 and 69. Most of the others are in their 80s and 90s. Grace Gary is 99. She dressed up as Eliza Doolittle, portrayed in a 1960s film musical by one of her favorite actresses, Audrey Hepburn.

Other models played parts including a poolside penguin, a blues music duo and Sally Fields' character in the 1960s sitcom "The Flying Nun." That last bit involved a ladder and Sepulveda aiming his point-and-shoot while lying on his back to simulate the "nun" in mid-flight.

Other people posed in scenes designed to their passion for golf, bingo and In-N-Out hamburgers.

Sepulveda asked Betty Jane Mason if she would pose as cartoon character Betty Boop. Mason, who turned 92 in May, had different ideas.

Retired high school tennis coach John Sepulveda came up with the brainstorm of convincing his neighbors to dress up as characters ranging from a penguin to a flying nun for a calendar. TOM KISKEN/THE STAR

From left to right, Don and Evelyn Knapp and Jimmy Secor tell stories at a mobile home retirement community gathering. All three were models in a calendar featuring residents in their 80s and 90s. TOM KISKEN/THE STAR

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She worked at Consolidated Aircraft factory in San Diego for a year during World War II after marrying a man headed for the Navy who would become her husband for 56 years.

"I was a riveter," she said. "I was only 18 and I had to get a job."

For the calendar, she found a red bandana, a blue shirt and an American flag pin. She flexed her bicep and became the poster girl created by Norman Rockwell, Rosie the Riveter.

"I said, 'If I'm going to be there I want something from my past,'" she said.

Jimmy Secor is The Patrician's host with the most, known for his massive Christmas parties where every guest receives a goodie bag.

Secor is 83 and worked as a bailiff, then a supervisor for the Ventura County Sheriff's Office. After that, he worked for 15 years in security at the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas.

Now he's retired but keeps busy with activities ranging from serving as a lector at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church in Ventura to once-a-month jaunts to Santa Ynez and the Chumash Casino. He plays the penny slots.

"The first two years I went I won $15,000," he said, noting that his winnings have dipped dramatically.

Secor's son bought a flowing white tunic during a trip to Egypt and gave it to his father. Secor wore it at a Halloween party and then donned it again for the calendar's November slot. Sepulveda used Photoshop to add a camel and a desert.

"When I was in Israel, I rode on a camel," said Secor, wearing a Sneezy the dwarf cap, "so it kind of made me feel like that King Tut ought to be alright."

The calendar is neither a business venture nor a fundraiser. It's just something Sepulveda did to have fun with his friends. It's being distributed almost solely to mobile home park residents and family.

He gave each of them calendars and a framed photo of their shoot. They ordered more for relatives at $12 apiece. Sepulveda talks about doing more calendars.

The current project will be featured in an upcoming newsletter at The Patrician. It gives the residents one more thing to chat about before bingo, a little more ammunition for teasing.

That joshing sometimes focuses on Schneider because of her easy temperament and her willingness to become a biker babe.

She was born in Racine, Wisconsin, and has lived in Southern California since Harry Truman was president. Now her friends make "vroom, vroom" sounds when she maneuvers her walker from one room to the next.